I didn’t miss anything by skipping last week’s posting. The Dow Jones saw its latest correction bottom on March 23rd declining to -11.58% in the BEV chart below. Since then the Dow Jones has oscillated from just below -10% and up to the -8% BEV levels as bulls and bears alike wait to see what is coming their way.

So what’s next for the Dow Jones? Well, my thinking is the Dow Jones saw its last all-time high on January 26th, and in the three months that followed its BEV plot has developed a pattern of lower highs and lower lows.

It took sixteen months to build the exceptionally steep Trump Rally, and just one week to eliminate a quarter of it. While I wouldn’t call that jolting reversal a stock-market crash in the ordinary sense, the largest one-day point fall in the history of the market (by far) certainly marks a massive change in market conditions. From this point forward, it won’t be the same market it was.

We increasingly see claims low volatility in the markets may be structural. Even as we agree that some of the analyses we see make good points, we are concerned we may be setting ourselves up for a major shock. Let me explain.

The common narrative is that the US is entering a golden age in its economy and that this growth will drive stocks ever higher.

The reality is that GDP growth has collapsed. The third quarter of last year (3Q16) was the quarter everyone thought signaled a new beginning with growth of 3.5%. However, the very next quarter’s growth (4Q16) collapsed to 1.9%.

And thus far this quarter 1Q17 is tracking at 1.8%

Put simply, growth is NOT coming soon if at all. Even Trump’s top economic advisor has admitted that GDP growth of 3% is unlikely until the end of 2018.

To truly appreciate market crashes, you must have an ample serving of grey hair.

Over the weekend, I must have received three dozen “Emergency Email Alert” notifications by newsletter services and financial intermediaries that got absolutely obliterated Friday morning and were expecting more of the same on Monday, which they got in spades. This new generation of “wealth advisors” has, unfortunately, been living off the largess of Central Bank guarantees and the winks and nudges of the “Finance Ministers” and “Treasury Secretaries” and “Chancellors of the Exchequer,” where they make investment decisions based not upon analyses of balance sheets or income statements but upon the collective wisdom of Champagne Socialists. I have been writing about this for about thirty-five years and while it has not yet manifested itself in the advance of the prices of precious metals to levels that would correspond to the level of coinciding currency debasement, especially in the United States and Europe, it is going to be the “Talk of the Town” here in 2016.